Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum, seethe with indignation, which I will now try to get over. It’s unseemly to stay mad at an artist whose canonical stature, as graphed by the fervor of intelligent admirers, not to mention market value, has only grown since his death, in 1992, at the age of eighty-two. But first I must file away my accumulated objections to the theatrical shock tactics with which Bacon, in the nineteen-forties, aimed to create museum-worthy European painting that could stand up to that of his hero, Picasso. An old politics of style hovers. Bacon opposed American Abstract Expressionism, scorning Jackson Pollock’s manner as “old lace” and Mark Rothko’s as “rather dismal variations on colour.” I have liked to believe that, in the mid-century contest for a radically new and befitting Western art, my countrymen played fair, and Bacon cheated. They forged integral styles that absorbed and transcended Impressionism and Cubism, engulfing rather than just addressing the eye. He vamped with an eclectic mix of Expressionist tactics and decorative longueurs. But I’m aware that the scorekeeping applies to a game not won or lost but called on account of rain—proliferating points of view that have swamped all would-be authoritative accounts of art history along with those of history, period.

In fact, it is Bacon, rather than the Abstract Expressionists, who now looks prophetic about subsequent developments in art, starting with Pop and continuing through the so-called Pictures Generation, the worthy subject of a concurrent exhibition at the Met. The key is his pioneering use of photographs and printed sources for his subject matter. To make his well-known, mordant takeoffs on Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (circa 1650), beginning in the early nineteen-fifties, he worked from reproductions, passing up opportunities to view the original in Rome during an extended stay there. Bacon also exerts an influence on young artists of today, such as Peter Doig and other friskily decadent British-educated painters. So here goes a rearguard skirmish, on behalf of Pollock and Rothko—and of Willem de Kooning, who, like Bacon, was a self-conscious inheritor of European tradition, an Oedipal scion of Picasso, and lingeringly a figurative artist, despite his achievements in abstraction.

Bacon was born in Ireland, in 1909, the son of a cutlery heiress and a military man who raised horses. As a teen-ager, Bacon was flamboyantly effeminate, and his behavior enraged his father, who, according to a story reported by a friend, the novelist Caroline Blackwood, had him horsewhipped by grooms. By 1926—spottily educated, having run away from boarding school—he was living in London on an allowance from his mother, supplemented by petty theft and, a bit later, by occasional largesse from enamored older men. Jobs as a valet and a telephone answerer, for a dress company, were brief. Bacon read eagerly—Nietzsche, Eliot—and knocked around London, Berlin, and Paris. He was excited by Russian Revolutionary and Surrealist films. A show of works by Picasso in Paris in 1928 fired an artistic ambition that would sputter until the war years. Among the few early works he did not destroy is the first in the Met show: “Crucifixion” (1933), a vaguely Picassoesque figure, also reminiscent of work by a mentoring friend, Graham Sutherland, in ghostly white-on-black. The religious reference is not pious. All his life, in the words of his most devoted critic, the eloquent David Sylvester, Bacon was “an old-fashioned militant atheist who always seemed to be looking for pretexts to issue a reminder that God was dead and to bang a few nails into his coffin.” He made a compensatory sacrament of a penchant for rugged sex, alcohol, and gambling.

In 1929, all of twenty years old, he set up as an interior designer in London. He enjoyed immediate success, recognized in an issue of a leading magazine devoted to “The 1930 Look in British Decoration,” but, in a decade of abundant social and erotic doings, he stuck with nothing for long. When war came, in 1939, asthma got him excused from the military and then, tormented by dusty air during the Blitz, from a civil-service position. At a house in South Kensington, his major work commenced. Here I glide past immense quantities of biography, amounting to an alternately exalted and gutter picaresque, which, in writings about Bacon, make him seem as much a literary character as a working artist. While his work is routinely celebrated as an authentic reaction to the horrors and the dislocations of the Second World War, it can come off, in the telling, as a pageant of hangovers and refractory lovers. He remains, in death, the raffish celebrity that he was in life; a meticulous re-creation of one of his incredibly cluttered studios, in which a book of Velázquez lies near a beefcake magazine, lures tourists to the municipal Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin.

In 1943, Bacon painted “Figure Getting Out of a Car,” derived from a photograph of Hitler. It centers on a naked, long-necked lump, whose head is all toothy maw. This seminal picture is not at the Met, but variations of the figure, on orange grounds, dominate a triptych, “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (circa 1944), which announces Bacon’s vision of an age of monstrosity. “Painting” (1946), from the Museum of Modern Art, renders a crucified victim as sides of beef. Some screaming Popes of the early fifties are striated with vertical bands suggested by Albert Speer’s cathedral of searchlights for a Nazi rally. Writing in 1948, Sylvester detected in Bacon’s style a redolence of the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald’s “germanic temperament of epileptic delirium.” In ways comparable to but ranging beyond those of his existentialist contemporary Alberto Giacometti, Bacon mobilized an emotion of energetic, strangely energizing despair. He regularly proclaimed his allegiance to primal drives as the only credible substitute for meaning in a hostile universe. (But did he have to be quite so enthusiastic about it?)

Bacon’s striking formal innovations, in handlings of pictorial space, include swiftly limned cubical enclosures and evocations of proscenium stages, in which single figures—or paired figures interwoven in paroxysms of sex and/or death—leap to the eye. Marvellously snarling knots of brushwork in the figures are increasingly offset by flat grounds and, at times, by overlaid geometrical ciphers, such as graphic arrows. The critic Lawrence Gowing wrote, approvingly, that Bacon hatched a look “at once of pastiche and of iconoclasm.” It’s on this point that I rebel in favor of, particularly, de Kooning’s hardly less ferocious “Women” paintings, which observe the imperative, shared by all the Abstract Expressionists, to reconcile figure and ground. Bacon spoke of “a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa,” but he attained that effect only in isolated passages, surrounded by dead space. His paintings, despite their extraordinary visual drama, thus lack a de Kooningesque sense of scale, which knits visible brushstrokes to the proportions of the canvas and relates the whole to the viewer’s body. Big or small, the size of a Bacon feels arbitrary. With a few exceptions—such as some van Gogh-inspired painterly thunderstorms that he made in the late nineteen-fifties, and which I wish he had built on—they are illustrational: tissues of fiction, or caricature, that complete themselves in literary imagination.

Not that there’s anything wrong with illustration. That’s the retroactive mercy of regarding Bacon in the light of Pop art and of later grapplings, by artists including the Pictures crew, with the tyranny of mechanical reproduction in contemporary culture. The most crucial tension of Bacon’s style, between life mediated by received images and life suffered in the flesh, can be awfully heady. In one of his caustic moods, he pronounced ninety-five per cent of people “fools about painting.” He complained, “Hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it.” I disagree, except in cases, like Bacon’s, where reading things in can seem pretty much the modus operandi. With a Pollock or a Rothko, you either feel about painting or have nothing to engage you. But I find myself persuaded that Bacon did identify with the visceral sorcery of paint—though he wouldn’t maintain it across any whole canvas—and that he wanted us to perceive that fact, even as he perversely threw melodramatic scenarios in the way.

A sense of dilemma leads me to reconsider a feature of his art that I have regarded as finicky and precious: his insistence that all his paintings be displayed behind glass, in gold frames. The only reason I could surmise for this was that Bacon used glass as a prosthetic gloss to unify his lurchingly fragmented surfaces. But having witnessed, at the Met, the gleaming parade of his career, I begin to understand the policy as a poignant gesture that weds decorative chic to fierce aspiration. Reflecting in more ways than one, the framing registers the viewer’s physical presence and, abstractly, the hermetic fate of Western painting, fallen from the Renaissance into a state of besiegement by cameras and printing presses. Bacon’s paintings objectify the subjective ordeal of perishing bodies that harbor immortal longings. In this, the paintings are indeed great, standing for a historical condition even of people who can’t abide them. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.